Group: General Soil Ecology

Scientists

PhD Students

Ricardo Schöps

Luis Daniel Prada Salcedo

Guest Scientists

Sandra Klemmer

Danuta Kapturska

Binwei Wu

Technicians

Beatrix Schnabel

Luise Kaiser

Research Topics

Biodiversity Exploratories

The Biodiversity Exploratories are a German Science Foundation funded research project (DFG Priority Programme 1374) and serve as open research platform for large-scale and long-term functional biodiversity research. They provide the scientific infrastructure to address critical questions about changes in biodiversity and to evaluate the impacts of those changes for ecosystem processes.The research platform Biodiversity Exploratories is organized in core and contributing projects. Our department is involved in the following projects:

SoilForEuropePredicting European forest soil biodiversity and its functioning under ongoing climate change

SoilForEurope is funded by BiodivERsA as part of the COFUND Call 2015-2016 on “Understanding and managing biodiversity dynamics to improve ecosystem functioning and delivery of ecosystem services in a global change context: the cases of soils and sediments, and land- river and sea-scapes".A main goal of SoilForEUROPE is to determine the relationships between tree species diversity and soil biodiversity, and their consequences for ecosystem functioning across major European forest types. These linkages may help to predict and manage soil biodiversity based on the diversity and relative abundance of tree species.Our department is involved in the following project:

Our department is interested in developing and adaption of bioinformatics analysis pipelines for metagenome and metatranscriptome data of highly diverse (micro)organisms communities as well as performing bioinformatics and multivariate statistics. |
Dr. Anna Heintz-Buschart

The department is also involved in the DFG-funded project GFBio – a sustainable, service oriented, national data infrastructure facilitating data sharing for biological and environmental research. |
more informationChristina Weißbecker

Further Research Interests

Genomic G-quadruplexes (G4) as special structures of G-rich DNA or RNA with potential role in gene regulation and genome stability. |
Dr. Regina Stoltenburg